RAPPER: The Copier Modeling Project
David Bell, Daniel Bobrow, Brian Falkenhainer, Markus Fromherz, Vijay
Saraswat, and Mark Shirley
Abstract
The programme of research of model-based diagnosis is based
on several assumptions, foremost of which is the availability
of component-based models of the system being diagnosed. This
assumption has been fairly innocuous for diagnosis of networks
of combinatorial devices, for which the construction of models
with appropriate levels of discriminatory power has been easy.
A priori, however, there is no reason to believe that it will
be possible to easily construct models of appropriate
generality, power and usability for complex, real-time,
computational electro-mechanical systems.
This paper reports on a project we started three years ago to
construct a component-based model for the input
document-handler of a photocopier. Our goal was to develop a
model that was rich enough to allow the generation of
diagnostic trees with the same discriminatory power as existing
documentation (RAPs, or Repair Action Procedures), which are
by and large constructed manually. This goal has been met in
principle, but we have learnt several useful lessons along the
way.
Postscript file
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